Scaffolds have been used in the past to repair and service structures but have many problems. For example, many of these scaffolds am composed of materials such as wood and metal can only be used once. Thus, these scaffolds become unusable for future projects. Further, attempting to reuse scaffolds can be cumbersome because of the difficulty of transporting the material to various sites as well as the time required to assemble. Thus, traditional scaffolds add costly expenses to the overall repair project. For example, using the traditional scaffold structures as work platforms for repairs such as the sandblasting and painting of bridges can take several days.
Adapting the roofs of vehicles such as trucks and vans to be used as work support platforms are not practical for many reasons. Further, most roofs on trailers, trucks and vans are not strong enough to be capable of supporting workers and equipment. In fact, the potential weight of such workers and equipment could cause the roofs on conventional trailers to buckle and collapse. See U.S. Pat. No. 4,887,860 to Dowty.
Further, conventional trucks and vans do not provide space nor containers for adequately catching and storing debris particles that are the result of repair operations such as those caused from sandblasting bridge structures. Thus, current sandblasting operations require extra workers, time and related expense in order to adequately clean up bridge repairing worksites. Also, since no adequate methods are used for catching the used sand in a sandblasting operation, new sand must be used at all new sites.
Thus, the need exists for an improved system and method that avoids the problems mentioned above with prior art systems.